David
Bellany.The NYT.“Plan Is to Put
Fish-free Fish on the Menu.” NADG (7-14-19).“Impossible Foods [Impossible
Whopper now available at Burger King] is joining a crowded field of food
companies developing alternatives to traditional seafood….”

Nathan
Owens.“Tofurky Sues Over State’s
Labeling Law.”NADG (7-23-19).

AR’s law impose fines on meatless
products with a reference to meat on the package label.

Deena Shanker.Bloomberg News.“Kellogg’s Beefs Up Meatless: New Plant-based
Options in Wings.”NADG (9-8-19).Next year the
“Incogmeato” burger “designed to mimic meat’s look and falvor.”

HEALTH, NUTRITION

Articles from Good Medicine, published
by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (Summer 2019).

Neal
Barnard.“Not Health Food.”Barnard is President of the Physicians
Committee.“When it comes to causing
health problems, few foods are worse than chicken”:

“largest
source of cancer-causing heterocyclic amines in the American diet”’

Aug 3, 2015 - Given the subtitle of Carl Safina's fascinating and expansive
new book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and
Feel, it's no surprise. . .
.SEE AT END INFORMATION ABOUT ALL OF
SAFINA’S BOOKS.

I WROTE THIS LETTER TO JULIE CASTLE, CEO OF SAVE THEM ALL, an
org. dedicated to “ending the killing of pets in our nation’s shelters.”

Dear Ms. Castle,

I opened your donation solicitation letter with pleasant expectations
from your title, until I discovered you actually strive to save only PETS.I do thank you for making that effort, but
you should change the title of your organization, since millions of farm
animals are killed to be eaten, an extremely repugnant reality.The more we know about sentient creatures,
the more we realize humans are fellow animals.You should change your name to SAVE ALL PETS.

Dick Bennett, Editor, Vegetarian
Action

AGAINST EXTREME WEATHER, DEFENDING THE CLIMATE

Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter.
The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and
insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. (And find the
website version of this week’s letter here.)

By Jillian Mock .AUGUST 21, 2019

This week, we’re trying something different. Usually, our One
Thing You Can Do feature highlights an idea for reducing your climate
footprint. For a change, we decided to look at an individual action and talk
about what would happen if everybody in the United States actually adopted
it.

Here’s the question: What if everybody in the United States
ate less meat? We don’t mean going vegetarian. Just less.

Is that realistic? “There is historical precedent,” said
Richard Waite, an associate in the food program at the World Resources
Institute. Overall, Americans eat about a third less beef than they did in
the 1970s, he noted. It’s conceivable that we could make such a dietary shift
again.

So, according to a study this month in the journal Scientific Reports, if
everyone in the country reduced their consumption of beef, pork, and poultry
by a quarter and substituted plant proteins, we’d save about 82 million metric
tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. That would be a reduction of a
little more than 1 percent.

Just for comparison: If everyone in the country did go
vegetarian, cutting meat out completely and replacing it with plant proteins
of the same nutritional value, we’d save 330 million metric tons of
greenhouse gas emissions per year. In that case, the savings would be about 5
percent.

Keep in mind, studies like this one necessarily include some
assumptions about farming practices, dietary choices and even market forces.
The numbers here are an estimate based on the average American diet and
agricultural emissions data.

The environmental benefits of reducing meat, of course, would
be lower in places that eat less meat in the first place. For reference, meat
consumption in Australia is only slightly lower than the United States.
Canada and the European Union are in the range of 150 pounds per person,
according to the O.E.C.D.

That means, for just about any developed country, the benefits
of reducing meat would be significant.

Any immediate drop in emissions would be only part of the
story, though, according to Mr. Waite. Following our example from above,
cutting back meat by a quarter would also free up about 23 million acres of
high-quality land, an area roughly the size of Indiana.

Some of that land could be converted to more efficient food
production, like growing high-protein lentils, or could be turned into
forestland, which absorbs and stores carbon dioxide. Both would be crucially
important as we try to feed a rising global population and to simultaneously
mitigate the effects of climate change, according to a recent report by the United Nations.

The upside of eating less meat, incidentally, could go way
beyond the environment. If you’re living in a Western country, it would
probably be good for your health.

That was the conclusion of a report this year in the medical journal The Lancet, which suggested a
dramatic reduction in red meat consumption for people who eat a lot of it,
like Americans and Canadians. People in North America eat more than six times
the recommended amount of red meat, the report said.

What Can You Do About the Looming Food Crisis?
Take Action Today!8-13-19

U.S. farmers are already dealing with the
impact of climate change—and it’s only going to get worse, here and
around the globe.

Heavy rain and flooding in the U.S.
heartland—made worse by climate change—prevented farmers from
planting more than 19 million acres of crops
this year.

It was the highest total of unplanted acres
ever recorded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

According to last week’s IPCC report, more than
500 million people worldwide today already live in areas where the land
cannot provide adequate food.

If we fail to act on climate change, the
world’s food supply will only diminish.

Here’s what the IPCC says we can do to reverse
these dangerous trends:

• As individuals, we can eat a
climate-friendly diet:

“Balanced diets featuring plant-based foods,
such as coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, and animal-sourced
food produced sustainably in low greenhouse gas emission systems present
major opportunities for adaptation to and limiting climate change,” said
Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II and one of the authors of
the report.

• As nations, we can adopt policies that
support “sustainable land management:”

The IPCC defines this as the “stewardship and
use of land resources, including soils, water, animals and plants, to meet
changing human needs, while simultaneously ensuring the long-term productive
potential of these resources and the maintenance of their environmental
functions.” The report authors list several examples, including agroecology,
agroforestry, conservation agriculture, crop diversity, crop rotations,
organic farming, pollinator protection, rain water harvesting, and range and
pasture management.

These practices can “prevent and reduce land
degradation, maintain land productivity, and sometimes reverse the adverse
impacts of climate change on land degradation… Reducing and reversing land
degradation, at scales from individual farms to entire watersheds, can
provide cost-effective, immediate, and long-term benefits to communities…”

The USDA first set “land stewardship” goals in 1933, when it
established the Soil Conservation Service to address the Dust Bowl. Yet in
recent decades, federal policy has pushed farmers to rely on machinery,
chemicals and plowing up virgin land to maintain high yields—regardless of
the impact on the soil or the climate.

Farmers are interested in conservation
programs, but budget cuts have forced up to 75 percent of eligible applicants
to be turned away.

The Climate Stewardship Act is the first bill
since the New Deal era to propose making a renewed commitment to soil health
for food security and the climate.